Viruses are big, it’s the pictures that got small
Going to movie theaters may not be essential, but some of us miss it
Not long after April 1902 – that’s when the first venue dedicated specifically to the showing of motion pictures opened in the United States – movie theaters began to take shape as something bigger than themselves in many people’s minds. They’ve been called temples and shrines, a place of sanctuary, a place to escape. More prosaic thinkers might have described them as their “happy place.”
For me, a cinephile ab initio, they’ve always been more than just a second home. Movie theaters are where I go to see everything expand and narrow at the same time, where the universal becomes the personal and vice versa.
It’s a communal experience, this public consumption of movies, among other people we try our best to ignore, and shush or give the evil eye to when we can’t. That seeming incongruity, that paradox of wanting a shared happening of something so uniquely personal is mirrored by what’s going on up on the screen. We see real life moving before us in what used to be 24 frames, each one of them artificial by design.
And since mid-march, those “dream palaces” have been shut down, and remain so here in New York. A global pandemic tends to do that sort of thing. As recently as two weeks ago, Gov. Andrew Cuomo reiterated his stance that movie theaters would remain closed indefinitely within the state, even as the two biggest theater chains in the country, Regal Cinemas and AMC Theatres, prepared to reopen elsewhere.
“I’m sure there is a whole group of people who say, ‘I cannot live without going to the movies,’” the governor said. “But on a relative risk scale, a movie theater is less essential and poses a high risk.”
I could be hyperbolic or melodramatic in response, but it’s hard to disprove his points. I have lived without going to the movies and going wasn’t essential to my survival. Just my happiness. And my mental well-being.
Movies have endured onslaught upon onslaught, and this could turn out to be just a temporary, if highly deadly, bump in the road. Films have been with us through world wars and national disasters. They saw their first real rival in the 1950s with the rise of television, and then cable, and premium cable, and Betamax, and VHS, and Laserdiscs, and DVDS, and Netflix, and streaming, and a second golden age of television, etc.
And theaters are still here. Sure, the chains and googleplexes might have long ago swallowed up most of the grand theater spaces and independent movie houses of old, but many of them have survived, if not exactly thrived, too.
But what about tomorrow? How long can doors stay closed, projectors remain dark, popcorn go unpopped? And even after that, in the best-case scenario where COVID-19 is contained with a vaccine, what form will movie-going take? Can things ever go back to normal? Probably more importantly, can we?
As eager as I am to return to the theater, I’m not sure spaced-out seating and the promise of new ventilation systems is enough for me. It might take me a little while longer to feel comfortable sitting in the dark, both literal and figurative. Does that make me a fair-weather film fan?
I’ve always been one of those “a theater is the only proper place to see a film” kind of people. Even with all the convenience and technological advances, watching a movie at home, no matter the screen, has never been my favorite. The ability to pause to grab another snack or drank, to go to the bathroom, to throw that laundry into the dryer, disrupts the flow. The distractions of everyday living are impossible to ignore. The lights are too bright or too dim. The volume control isn’t compatible for home viewing. Your kid won’t get off his damn phone while he’s supposed to be watching the damn movie!
Imperfect though it may be, theater going is what I love. I’ve even begun to miss some of the more annoying aspects (but not 20 minutes of commercials before the movie, never that). It seems like forever since I’ve gotten to listen to the boorish commentary of some knowit-all movie snob in the ticket line. What I wouldn’t give to be stuck in front of the guy from “Annie Hall,” pontificating on Fellini and Samuel Beckett and Marshall Mcluhan.
See, even movies have shown us what it is to see a movie in a theater, the medium in this case truly being the message. If you’ve ever seen “Cinema Paradiso,” you know what it is to fall in love … with the movies, as well as everything else.
Woody Allen again, but has there ever been a film that better showed true movie fandom, indeed, fanaticism, than “The Purple Rose of Cairo”? The aching need for everything that’s illuminated on that giant screen to be real as you sit there, one of the lonely masses, is palpable in that movie.
If you’ve never seen “Sullivan’s Travels,” move along, I don’t think we can be friends. But if you have, you know the scene I’m talking about. The one where the purpose of the hero’s journey all becomes clear “at the movies,” even if the “theater” is makeshift, to say the least. It guts me every single time.
Or think about the movie theater scene in “Diner” … or wait, let’s skip that one.
But there’s at least one more movie theater scene I can’t stop replaying in my head, though. It’s the one in “Outbreak.” (No spoiler alert here: The movie’s 25 years old and the scene I’m talking about is not only arguably its most famous, but it’s kind of the whole point of the story.)
An Ebola-like virus has escaped from its birthplace in Africa and through a series of events landed in a small American town. It’s passed along unknowingly from one unmasked, non-social distancing person to another until it reaches a guy who goes to a crowded movie theater. He starts feeling the effects, sneezes, and the camera then takes us on a terror ride as it magnifies the germs and fluid leaving his body and floating over the theater, following one of them, which ultimately enters the wide-open, laughing mouth of a young woman.
While studios have shifted some of their product to streaming services and video on demand, and bumped others to next year, and drive-ins have entered another resurgence thanks to the attendant fresh air and wide-open spaces, and awards season becomes a giant question mark, I still think about what waits for us inside the theater, in the dark. It used to be my salvation and my identity. Now, who are we if we can’t go to the movies?